Well I’ve been playing with some old MS-DOSsoftware, and putting stuff together for it, I’ve had some MAJOR issues with SDL, between mapping my keyboard incorrectly, to the video not refreshing correctly when it’s not in focus or if another window overlapped it.

It’s a shame as DOSBox is usually pretty cool, but on my x64 system it’d been flaking out with the most annoying being the \,/,{,} & arrow keys not working right. Well for the heck of it, I downloaded & built my own SDL.dll for Qemu, and overwrote the one that comes with DOSBox… And it works PERFECTLY…..

This has been a WAY better fix, then messing around with my HID, removing drivers on EVERY reboot.

I’ve slowly been trying to piece together my old Netware 4.1 stuff to try to run it on Virtual PC… the best I can find is that I’d need parts of Netware 6 to get the networking to run….

But then the other day, I had remembered that you could run Netware 4.1 under OS/2 (the 32bit ones)..

The only ‘snag’ is that I’d need a working CD-ROM driver… And IDE-CD’s didn’t become somewhat popular until the 3.0 WARP days.

Well I did manage to find this zip file, CL_ATAPI.ZIP that contains the IDE drivers!.. And as it mentions in the BBS description it’ll work on 2.0! Except that it gives NO hints on how to install it.

After a LOT of googling around, I was able to piece together a working solution. Adding this to the config sys by first commenting out the ibm1s506.add.. (Naturally unzip CL_ATAPI.zip into the os2 directory!

This weekend has been kind of crappy as we had some cisco switches flake out, but nobody knew anything happened… I’d been pulled away on so many things over the last few years that monitoring them kind of fell by the waaaayside.

Well in this economic environment nobody is going to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for some simple syslog/polling system that pages people. I needed one for free.

And years ago, I wrote a simple one that revolved around SQL Server 7/MSDE 1.0

Anyways I’ve made it as 2 CD images, and if you are bored, or in the need to poll devices with a basic TCP connect you can download it here:

For some reason all the above stuff is getting dammed near impossible to find on Microsoft’s site. I guess it is end of the road for the NT 4.0 heyday. So at the least, this is my way to keep a location to download this software, as I’m sure someone will need it someday.

MSDE 1.0 for those who don’t know was a redistributable version of SQL Server 7.0 that had a 10 user limit, and a 2GB database size limit. Also there was no GUI management but it was great to use, because unlike SQL Express, it included the SQL Agent. The agent can run tasks at certain times, say like run a TSQL script that dumps a list of machines from a table into the hosts file, then tries to connect to each machine and record the state into a database…..

It was VERY useful stuff for the time.

There is no exciting screnshot, as I never did make an interface to the thing, instead I opted to configure everything through Access.

Other then that, I’ve been playing with a BackOffice 1.5 CD set I got on ebay… NT 3.51, MS Mail 3.5 & SQL 6.0!! It’s been so long, but MSSQL 6.0 was the first SQL server that I ever was payed to manage… It’s amazing how far we’ve come as an industry, and at the same point how things stay the same, although the installation of NT 3.51 is SO FAST!!!

: 0080 First physical hard disk, head 0. (Substitute 0081 for this entry if you are clearing the table on the second physical hard disk, 0082 if you are clearing the third physical hard disk, and so forth).

Also while working on Tradewars C today, I came across this great package called OpenDoors. Even better is that it’s under the LGPL. The only “downside” is that OpenDoors requires Visual C++ 6.0 or higher to build, because of the toolbar.. Also I’m not sure if going from VC 1.0 to 9.0 didn’t flake some stuff out as well… I’m not 100% sure about it, but the trading part of the game feels.. weird.

The examples are pretty straight forward, and it took a few hours on & off for me to convert the standalone tradewars into a door program. I like the feel of it so much I may try to see about converting SIMH to run with it.. Maybe even dumbfrotz.

I had to start separating things out to make some older C compilers happy…

I still do not understand how ‘float’ types keep changing sizes between 16bit/32bit compilers…. Was there ever ANY consistent floating point types in C between 16/32bit? It really sucks to have binary data and find out you cannot ‘read’ it…..

Did people just force people to dump their data into ASCII, and reload it into 32bit formats, and tell everyone to ONLY use 32bit?

I know I’m like 15 years late to this party, as everyone is going through the win32 to win64 thing… Although I’m surprised Tradewars C’s win64 version runs happily with a win32 generated data file…….

So while I was going through the motion of making my tradewars more… multi user friendly, I needed to test between all kinds of clients and a server…

Since I’m using MS-DOS, Windows 3.0 as my test bed (if it’ll run there, it’ll run anywhere!) I had MAJOR issues with the 3.0 lan client… But digging around on the NT 4.0 Server CD I tried the lanman.dos client.